372 - Recent Discoveries and the Biblical World

Recent Discoveries and the Biblical World
By Raymond E. Brown, S.S.
Wilmington, Delaware, Michael Glazier. 1983. 101 pp. $4.95.

The well known New Testament scholar at Union Theological Seminary. New York, provides the general reader in this book with a handy background guide to the historical roots of the Bible. For all of its brevity and non-technical language, it is a remarkably comprehensible essay on how archaeological discovery has affected our understanding and interpretation of Scripture.

After an introduction which includes personal testimony and warnings against the fundamentalist mindset-Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish which denies the historical conditionness of divine revelation, Brown performs something of a literary tour de force in the remainder of the book. The reader is given a lucid overview of the key archaelogical discoveries. first documents and then non-literary evidence of selected sites, and how thew have influenced the meaning of Scripture. In more or less chronological order from the Old Testament into the New, we learn about texts from Ebla to Qumran and Nag Hammadi-with a word on forgeries-and then move from Jericho to Rome, with comment on the Shroud of Turin and crucifixion. It is a readable and useful text for all.

Robert A. Bennett
Episcopal Divinity School
Cambridge, Mass.